Perhaps the different effect of the ring on the wearer has to do with how powerful Sauron is at the time. During Bilbo's posession of the ring Sauron was defeated as the Necromancer, right? That's why Gandalf ran off and was absent for much of The Hobbit. Once Frodo finally puts on the ring the Eye of Sauron is searching for it. Sauron is growing in power. It seems reasonable that the effect of putting Sauron's ring on would be different.
It is, anyhow, an interesting take on the film. At least AC didn't go for the karma whoring.
I have my tickets in hand and will see the film in two hours. My only fear is that the action will resemble Batman with quick close shots. I am hoping for the sweeping action of Iron Monkey.
Real advance is the refresh rate.
on
Electronic Paper
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The advane made is that It also refreshes at about 50 Hertz, fast enough to stream video.
This makes video possible. This is in contrast to other efforts, which have concentrated at static images with relatively slow refresh.
Also, the display is capable of displaying 256 shades of gray. This would make anti-aliased text possible.
Imagine having a roll-up video screen in your pda/laptop. You could have a pen-sized cylinder that is your pda and simply pull the screen out when you needed it.
Sorry, should have been less specific. I didn't mean that he should sign up for that particular episode. Though there could be some humour ing being the odd man out.
in an episode that will likely be our season finale in
May, all of the following: William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, George Takei, Walter
Koenig, and Nichelle Nichols
Wil,
Maybe you should sign up for this. I am sure that you could have lots of fun on Futurama. Besides, it seems that you've been ignored in your quest to be on The Tick, or anything with Bruce Campbell or at least to have your questions answered. It seems that Futurama has a guest star every other week or so, same with The Simpsons so your odds should be good.
Thanks for being so cool. We (ok, I) appreciate having a high-profile geek out there! And I bet you show more often than RMS. And your shirt was certainly funnier than his halo.
Could someone explain to me how this comment is currently rated a '4' but mine, which is the grandparent of this comment, got modded up to '5' then down to '-1' and now is resting at '0'?
You selected the most misleading sentence of the whole article:
Boeing Commercial Airplanes will develop and test an electrically powered demonstrator airplane,
They are making a demonstration plane that has a propeller that is powered by fuel cells.
However, this NOT the goal of their project. And as you stated this is not going to lead to fuel-cell powered jumbo-jets. Once again from the article:
``Our ultimate goal is to replace the auxiliary power unit,''
and
``Fuel cells show the promise of one day providing efficient, essentially pollution-free electrical power for commercial airplane primary electrical power needs,''
Now I agree that this is great, but everyone seems to be running around thinking it is something that it isn't.
Oh, and we found that you should pour liquid nitrogen into containers first rather than trying to make ice cream by directly pouring it into a mix of milk and butter. And that the ice-cream so produced is exceptionally tasty.
Years ago I read an article about a guy from Jackson Hole, Wyoming who made gourmet ice cream. He had determined that the two things that separated good tasting ice creams from the rest were:
1. Fat. Ice cream needs lots of fat.
2. Size of the ice crystals. The water in ice cream can be frozen in big crystals or little ones. If you freeze it slowly, you get big crystals. Freezing quickly leads to small crystals. Small crystals == better ice cream.
So this guy found that he could make the smallest crystals by pouring everything into a big bowl with some liquid nitrogen and stiring it really quickly. This was after trying several different methods of freezing the ice cream, none of which were fast enough for him.
He said that a good test of ice cream was whether it floated in water. Good ice cream should be dense enough to sink. I guess this is due to the high fat content. Of course once you put it in water, it is no longer good ice cream, right?
I saw a test firing of a rocket motor that is proposed to be used in a new program that is a replacement for the Pegasus. The motor is made by Thiokol and is very similar to the motor for the Peacekeeper missile. The rocket was to be carried on a 747. There is a series of illustrations of the concept here and another article on it here.
The test firing (it was about this time last year I think) must have been important because all sorts of VIPs from NASA and the Air Force showed up, which didn't normally happen.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Test firings are cool! The shockwave hitting you is really a unique experience.
Fuel cells and electric motors will not replace jet engines on commercial transports, but they could one day replace gas turbine auxiliary power units. Auxiliary power units, which typically are located in the rear fuselage with exhaust ports through the tail, are coupled to generators and compressors to produce electricity and air for airplane systems while on the ground and for backup use in flight.
Let me repeat, they are NOT trying to use fuel cells to replace the jet engines. They are going to use them to replace auxilary power units, which simply produce electricity.
So basically, this entire discussion here on/. is about the wrong thing! Not only is it about the wrong thing, but the thing that has been announced isn't that big of a deal. These are not electric aircraft that they are producing!
So move along now, the really is nothing to see here.
While this deal is a BIG deal for RedHat, it probably isn't exactly a huge thing for IBM. I doubt that the $2 drop in IBM's stock price had anything to do with this deal. It is more likely related to the fact that blue-chips in general fell today due to weak consumer confidence numbers that came out today.
Caldera's genius in buying DR Dos
on
Lineo Frees CP/M
·
· Score: 2
Caldera had to have one of the more innovative methods of funding their company that I've heard of.
They bought the rights to DR Dos and then sued Microsoft for having using dirty tactics to limit the success of DR Dos back in the late 80s and early 90s. This was after DR Dos itself had been irrelevant for several years.
Caldera won something like $250,000,000 (I am too lazy to look up the exact figure) and besides a bunch of lawyers that got rich, Caldera got funding for their company.
So I guess that since Caldera purchased DR Dos simply in order to sue Microsoft, there is no reason to not open it now.
I just watched the episode. In general I agree with you. However, these people were simply trying to see how much money they could put into the pot, and they put A LOT in. $167,500 if I remember correctly. And in the end it came down to the two strongest, which rarely happens.
BTW, the EFF and all the other charites (except for the winner's) receive $10,000 according to the fine print at the end of the show.
I spend most of my on-the-job time working on various smart card projects. Having an internal power source could help in the race to stay ahead of differential power analysis attacks in which the keys can be extracted from a card by monitoring/varying the power supplied to it. It could also significantly increase the range of contactless cards.
However the pages that I read lacked a phrase that I was looking for: ISO 7816 Compliant. This is the specification that dictates the characteristics of a smart card. The flexibility, durability, and size of the card are dictated. This is important because these cards need to be able to live for years in people's wallets and occasionally even be used to scrape ice off of car windshields.:) And if a card with this battery is ISO 7816 compliant, then Power Paper should really mention it. If not, then they need to work on it before it will gain market acceptance. Phrases such as "highly flexible" just won't cut it if it isn't compliant.
You still have yet to show how freedom is actually being taken away. I agree that less freedom is given than could have been, but I can't take something that wasn't given to begin with.
That said, I posted this comment because I was asked to provide a description of what I had done. It actually sparked a bit of discussion and I recieved quite a few emails about this project.
The comment started out as a 2. I didn't expect it to get modded up since it says in the subject line that it is off-topic. Because it was and interesting post though it got modded up to a 4. I thought that was overrated and so did someone else since they quickly modded it down as overrated. Fine. Then there was an off-topic mod leaving it at 2. Also fine. I admitted it was off topic to begin with.
What annoys me is the second OT mod. I am going to repeat myself here: The post was obivously interesting to quite a few people. It generated more of a response than anything I've ever posted before. I ADMITTED that it was OT in the subject line. If someone didn't want to read it, fine, they could easily see that it was OT. However, it was also interesting and something worth sharing. Having it rated higher allowed it to be shared with more people.
The second person to mod it as ot is a lemming, pure and simple! I can read their mind, "Must use mod points!"
Question: Is there any reason you need to actually open up the monitor for these modifications?
The monitors that I did this with were from an Apple ][, a C=64 and a Bannana 2000 (ok, it was a Mac 128).
The first two use an RCA plug as input. Now I am not sure if there is a better way to do this with those monitors, but I am not aware of one.
The Mac of course has a built-in monitor and there is no imput.
I haven't tried this on any newer monitors other than the color one that started smoking. However, I am not sure if simply soldering something to the h and v lines would do the trick or not. How 'bout you try it and let us all know? I would certainly be interested.
That is really cool. I had thought about something similar with the color but not as complex. Unfortunately when the color monitor began to smoke my experiments were banned from the house. Also, I had run out of color monitors. I did use a separate amp on the later versions which gave me a lot of ability to tweak things to make it look better.
Disclaimer:
I am not an expert at this. If you mess with your own monitor I am not responsible. In fact, one monitor that I messed with started smoking.
Also, this could damage your stereo.
I have only had success with monochrome monitors. The color one is the one that started to smoke.
Ok, so I opened up the Mac and found the wires running to the back of the CRT. There is a pair for horizontal deflection of the beam and a pair for vertical.
If you clip them both, then the beam just hits the center of the screen.
After clipping them, run your speaker wires through them, left to the vetical and right to the horizontal.
When I say through, I mean through the coil on the back of the CRT. I don't mean the stubs of wire connected to the board.
Anyhow, if you splice your speaker wires so you can run the speaker in SERIES with the coil.
If you run them in parallel there might be very little resistance and that could mess with your stereo. However you might get better results that way. Mix and match and maybe put in a POT so you can adjust the amount of deflection and prevent the destruction of your stereo if yo choose to run it in parallel. Parallel seemed to give more deflection. Also, the horizontal and vertical will not deflect the same amount for the same input. You will need to mess with it to get it to look just right. Each monitor is different. You can make a traditional oscilliscope effect if you leave the horizontal wires hooked up to the monitor's board and just hook the vertical wires to the stereo. Some people prefer this.
Anyhow if you have the left side controlling the vertical deflection and the right side controlling the horizontal the beam draws funky roundish patterns.
Put in "Dark Side of the Moon" and enjoy! "Money" looks awesome since the clean stereo separation is clearly visible if you understand how the monitor works.
Ben Harper stuff also looks cool.
My email address is on the Anirak webpage that is linked to. If anyone sends me an e-mail I'll them the winamp pluggin.
Years ago I used to rewire old monitors to display funky patterns when I ran my stereo wires through them. Some day I may put up a web page describing the process. I have made a winamp pluggin that simulates the effect, which I will also post some day when I am not so lazy/busy with other things.
Anyhow, I bought an old Mac at the Goodwill for $5 and then modified it to make the funky patterns and shipped it to a friend for his birthday.
I went to Mailboxes Etc. and told them I wanted to ship it UPS. First they wanted to double box it. That alone would have cost $150, and would have substantially increased the shipping costs as well since double boxing makes things huge.
After convincing them that I had spent all of $5 and about two hours of my time on this, I conviced them that they could single-box it. However, they made me sign something that stated that it they broke it, it was my own fault.
Then while filling out the form there was a box for value. I put a sideways '8' since it was a one-of-a-kind item. They went crazy again and asked why I had done that. I replied that it was a work of electronic art that interacted with music in a unique way. That really worried them. This all occured in Palo Alto and maybe they were used to shipping strange expensive stuff.
Finally I crossed out the value and put in a big '0' and claimed that if it wasn't art then it was junk. That confused them but finally they shipped it, single boxed, for a total of about $70.
The moral of this story?
Mailboxes Etc. doesn't appreciate a smart-ass.
addendum: My friend painted it with gold paint and used it at parties. It was even more popular than his lava lamp.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps the different effect of the ring on the wearer has to do with how powerful Sauron is at the time. During Bilbo's posession of the ring Sauron was defeated as the Necromancer, right? That's why Gandalf ran off and was absent for much of The Hobbit. Once Frodo finally puts on the ring the Eye of Sauron is searching for it. Sauron is growing in power. It seems reasonable that the effect of putting Sauron's ring on would be different.
It is, anyhow, an interesting take on the film. At least AC didn't go for the karma whoring.
I have my tickets in hand and will see the film in two hours. My only fear is that the action will resemble Batman with quick close shots. I am hoping for the sweeping action of Iron Monkey.
This makes video possible. This is in contrast to other efforts, which have concentrated at static images with relatively slow refresh.
Also, the display is capable of displaying 256 shades of gray. This would make anti-aliased text possible.
Imagine having a roll-up video screen in your pda/laptop. You could have a pen-sized cylinder that is your pda and simply pull the screen out when you needed it.
Sorry, should have been less specific. I didn't mean that he should sign up for that particular episode. Though there could be some humour ing being the odd man out.
Wil,
Maybe you should sign up for this. I am sure that you could have lots of fun on Futurama. Besides, it seems that you've been ignored in your quest to be on The Tick, or anything with Bruce Campbell or at least to have your questions answered. It seems that Futurama has a guest star every other week or so, same with The Simpsons so your odds should be good.
Thanks for being so cool. We (ok, I) appreciate having a high-profile geek out there! And I bet you show more often than RMS. And your shirt was certainly funnier than his halo.
Hooray for lemming moderation!
PS, this guy is right about the air.
Boeing Commercial Airplanes will develop and test an electrically powered demonstrator airplane, They are making a demonstration plane that has a propeller that is powered by fuel cells. However, this NOT the goal of their project. And as you stated this is not going to lead to fuel-cell powered jumbo-jets. Once again from the article:
``Our ultimate goal is to replace the auxiliary power unit,''
and
``Fuel cells show the promise of one day providing efficient, essentially pollution-free electrical power for commercial airplane primary electrical power needs,''
Now I agree that this is great, but everyone seems to be running around thinking it is something that it isn't.
Oh, and we found that you should pour liquid nitrogen into containers first rather than trying to make ice cream by directly pouring it into a mix of milk and butter. And that the ice-cream so produced is exceptionally tasty.
Years ago I read an article about a guy from Jackson Hole, Wyoming who made gourmet ice cream. He had determined that the two things that separated good tasting ice creams from the rest were:
1. Fat. Ice cream needs lots of fat.
2. Size of the ice crystals. The water in ice cream can be frozen in big crystals or little ones. If you freeze it slowly, you get big crystals. Freezing quickly leads to small crystals. Small crystals == better ice cream.
So this guy found that he could make the smallest crystals by pouring everything into a big bowl with some liquid nitrogen and stiring it really quickly. This was after trying several different methods of freezing the ice cream, none of which were fast enough for him.
He said that a good test of ice cream was whether it floated in water. Good ice cream should be dense enough to sink. I guess this is due to the high fat content. Of course once you put it in water, it is no longer good ice cream, right?
The test firing (it was about this time last year I think) must have been important because all sorts of VIPs from NASA and the Air Force showed up, which didn't normally happen.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Test firings are cool! The shockwave hitting you is really a unique experience.
Fuel cells and electric motors will not replace jet engines on commercial transports, but they could one day replace gas turbine auxiliary power units. Auxiliary power units, which typically are located in the rear fuselage with exhaust ports through the tail, are coupled to generators and compressors to produce electricity and air for airplane systems while on the ground and for backup use in flight.
Let me repeat, they are NOT trying to use fuel cells to replace the jet engines. They are going to use them to replace auxilary power units, which simply produce electricity.
So basically, this entire discussion here on /. is about the wrong thing! Not only is it about the wrong thing, but the thing that has been announced isn't that big of a deal. These are not electric aircraft that they are producing!
So move along now, the really is nothing to see here.
Luckily, there are bunches of John Harrisons in IBM, so I don't need to post anonymously. I get calls/emails all the time for other John Harrisons. :)
Ok, if you bother to look up some of my posts it becomes obvious which one I am, but I don't see my boss reading much /.
While this deal is a BIG deal for RedHat, it probably isn't exactly a huge thing for IBM. I doubt that the $2 drop in IBM's stock price had anything to do with this deal. It is more likely related to the fact that blue-chips in general fell today due to weak consumer confidence numbers that came out today.
They bought the rights to DR Dos and then sued Microsoft for having using dirty tactics to limit the success of DR Dos back in the late 80s and early 90s. This was after DR Dos itself had been irrelevant for several years.
Caldera won something like $250,000,000 (I am too lazy to look up the exact figure) and besides a bunch of lawyers that got rich, Caldera got funding for their company.
So I guess that since Caldera purchased DR Dos simply in order to sue Microsoft, there is no reason to not open it now.
BTW, the EFF and all the other charites (except for the winner's) receive $10,000 according to the fine print at the end of the show.
However the pages that I read lacked a phrase that I was looking for: ISO 7816 Compliant. This is the specification that dictates the characteristics of a smart card. The flexibility, durability, and size of the card are dictated. This is important because these cards need to be able to live for years in people's wallets and occasionally even be used to scrape ice off of car windshields. :) And if a card with this battery is ISO 7816 compliant, then Power Paper should really mention it. If not, then they need to work on it before it will gain market acceptance. Phrases such as "highly flexible" just won't cut it if it isn't compliant.
You still have yet to show how freedom is actually being taken away. I agree that less freedom is given than could have been, but I can't take something that wasn't given to begin with.
That said, I posted this comment because I was asked to provide a description of what I had done. It actually sparked a bit of discussion and I recieved quite a few emails about this project.
The comment started out as a 2. I didn't expect it to get modded up since it says in the subject line that it is off-topic. Because it was and interesting post though it got modded up to a 4. I thought that was overrated and so did someone else since they quickly modded it down as overrated. Fine. Then there was an off-topic mod leaving it at 2. Also fine. I admitted it was off topic to begin with.
What annoys me is the second OT mod. I am going to repeat myself here: The post was obivously interesting to quite a few people. It generated more of a response than anything I've ever posted before. I ADMITTED that it was OT in the subject line. If someone didn't want to read it, fine, they could easily see that it was OT. However, it was also interesting and something worth sharing. Having it rated higher allowed it to be shared with more people.
The second person to mod it as ot is a lemming, pure and simple! I can read their mind, "Must use mod points!"
Am I taking this too seiously? Yes.
End Of Rant.
Is this something similar to the cave in ESB where Luke slices up the Darth Vader of his fears? Or is there a Darth Maul clone?
Also similar to ESB: there is going to be an asteroid field scene. For those who want, here is my ESB inspired asteriods game: Ultimate Blaster.
The monitors that I did this with were from an Apple ][, a C=64 and a Bannana 2000 (ok, it was a Mac 128).
The first two use an RCA plug as input. Now I am not sure if there is a better way to do this with those monitors, but I am not aware of one.
The Mac of course has a built-in monitor and there is no imput.
I haven't tried this on any newer monitors other than the color one that started smoking. However, I am not sure if simply soldering something to the h and v lines would do the trick or not. How 'bout you try it and let us all know? I would certainly be interested.
Thanks for the details.
Monitors are dangerous! You could shock yourself good! Like stop your heart shock yourself. Be careful if you are dumb enough to try this.
8P
In the future I will keep that in mind! Thanks.
I am not an expert at this. If you mess with your own monitor I am not responsible. In fact, one monitor that I messed with started smoking.
Also, this could damage your stereo.
I have only had success with monochrome monitors. The color one is the one that started to smoke.
Ok, so I opened up the Mac and found the wires running to the back of the CRT. There is a pair for horizontal deflection of the beam and a pair for vertical.
If you clip them both, then the beam just hits the center of the screen.
After clipping them, run your speaker wires through them, left to the vetical and right to the horizontal.
When I say through, I mean through the coil on the back of the CRT. I don't mean the stubs of wire connected to the board.
Anyhow, if you splice your speaker wires so you can run the speaker in SERIES with the coil.
If you run them in parallel there might be very little resistance and that could mess with your stereo. However you might get better results that way. Mix and match and maybe put in a POT so you can adjust the amount of deflection and prevent the destruction of your stereo if yo choose to run it in parallel. Parallel seemed to give more deflection. Also, the horizontal and vertical will not deflect the same amount for the same input. You will need to mess with it to get it to look just right. Each monitor is different. You can make a traditional oscilliscope effect if you leave the horizontal wires hooked up to the monitor's board and just hook the vertical wires to the stereo. Some people prefer this.
Anyhow if you have the left side controlling the vertical deflection and the right side controlling the horizontal the beam draws funky roundish patterns.
Put in "Dark Side of the Moon" and enjoy! "Money" looks awesome since the clean stereo separation is clearly visible if you understand how the monitor works.
Ben Harper stuff also looks cool.
My email address is on the Anirak webpage that is linked to. If anyone sends me an e-mail I'll them the winamp pluggin.
Anyhow, I bought an old Mac at the Goodwill for $5 and then modified it to make the funky patterns and shipped it to a friend for his birthday.
I went to Mailboxes Etc. and told them I wanted to ship it UPS. First they wanted to double box it. That alone would have cost $150, and would have substantially increased the shipping costs as well since double boxing makes things huge.
After convincing them that I had spent all of $5 and about two hours of my time on this, I conviced them that they could single-box it. However, they made me sign something that stated that it they broke it, it was my own fault.
Then while filling out the form there was a box for value. I put a sideways '8' since it was a one-of-a-kind item. They went crazy again and asked why I had done that. I replied that it was a work of electronic art that interacted with music in a unique way. That really worried them. This all occured in Palo Alto and maybe they were used to shipping strange expensive stuff.
Finally I crossed out the value and put in a big '0' and claimed that if it wasn't art then it was junk. That confused them but finally they shipped it, single boxed, for a total of about $70.
The moral of this story?
Mailboxes Etc. doesn't appreciate a smart-ass.
addendum: My friend painted it with gold paint and used it at parties. It was even more popular than his lava lamp.